Live Webcast: Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project

Keith’s note: On Thursday, 10 December 2009, we’ll be doing a live webcast from the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) at “McMoon’s” i.e. Building 596 at the NASA Ames Research Park. You can view the webcast at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/lunar-orbiter-image-recovery-project starting at 1 pm PST. We’ll also have a chat function enabled so that you can ask questions.

Dennis Wingo and I will give you a tour of our project including a walk through of the abandoned McDonald’s that has been our base of operations since 2008. We’ll also show you how we rack tapes, play them back, capture the data on a computer, and then stitch the image framelets together. You’ll be able to look over our shoulders and see the imagery as it appears on one of our old TV monitors. We’ve picked an especially interesting tape to show you. We’ll then post the raw image online later in the day. Eventually this image will be posted online at LPI and submitted to the NSSDC.

This project has been funded and supported by a bunch of imaginative folks at ESMD, IPP, NLSI, ARC, SkyCorp, SpaceRef Interactive, and Odyssey Moon with assistance from a range of people ranging from retired Lunar Orbiter project personnel and Lockheed Martin employees to local high school and college students. Soon, we expect to have two tape drives fully operational and to be able to produce images on a daily basis.

Oh yes, in case you are wondering, I donate my time (and money) to this project. What fun. Its like bringing a time machine back to life in a high tech junkyard. We are looking to begin some pervasive EPO in coordination with NLSI and the Challenger Center for Space Science Education in the very near future.